ARTICLE
Kaleidoscope:
The Interdisciplinary
Postgraduate Journal
of Durham University’s
Institute of Advanced
Study
3
ISSN 1756–8137
June 2009
‘Shred ends from remembered stars’
Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being as a Romantic Modernist
Rachel Hoyes
Hart Crane lived in a society that rejected his sense of self and being. Discriminated against
as a homosexual, living with little money in a city with which he often felt at odds while struggling to get published and understood as a poet, being human for Crane was fraught with
anxiety. Crane was immersed in a world in which ‘being human’ was an automatic state of
existence, but a status that needed to be consciously created, re-conceived and discovered.
Crane used poetry as the mode through which he discovered himself in relation to his world,
forming his sense of being human through understanding his self-as-poet.
Born in 1899, Crane was writing when ‘being human’ was being questioned and challenged
by Modernism. In the nineteenth century, luminaries such as Freud, Marx and Nietzsche had
begun to alter radically ideas of the consciousness and the mind, and of the power of humanity to influence and change the world. In the twentieth century, literary practitioners of
Modernism such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were upturning established understanding of
what it meant to be a poet and what it was to be human. Crane, however, was not comfortable
with this new system of values celebrating fragmented consciousness and culture and the
fast-changing world of industry. Instead, he drew upon his Romantic literary predecessors to
maintain a sense of continuity and establish values of longevity in an age of displacement,
heterodoxy and rapid change. He challenged some precepts of Modernist thought, particularly
T. E. Hulme’s Bergsonian view that literary tradition was futile to Modern poets living in an
age of impermanence.1 Crane wrote: “The deliberate program, then, of a ‘break’ with the past
or tradition seems to me to be a sentimental fallacy.”2 The Moderns wanted to break with the
past to express a new sense of being through a new form of poetry. Crane refuses this fracture;
he uses Romanticism to find links between the past, present and future of modern America.
America, for Crane, was a country that lacked history and literary heritage compared with
Europe, but by constructing a literary legacy he could seek to conceptualize “being human.”
1 Hulme, however, later changed his view of past literature, placing emphasis on Classical
literature to find a religious attitude that would give way to organisation and order to the
Modern poet’s thought and work: “It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent
can be got out of him.” Geoffrey Bullough, The Trend of Modern Poetry (London: Oliver and
Boyd, 1949), 80.
2 Hart Crane, “General Aims and Theories,” in Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, ed. James Scully
(London: Fontana Library, 1966), 162. All quotations from “General Aims and Theories” will
be taken from this volume.
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Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
He wrote: “The main faults are not of our city, alone. They are of our age. A period that is
loose at all ends, without apparent direction of any sort.”3 Crane did not view America’s loose
and open-endedness as simply a “fault” of his age, but meant it had potential with no limits
to what humanity could achieve. He believed he was a “potential factor” in writing America
a new mythology, using European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism to discover
the “as yet undefined spiritual quantities” of America,4 and find a “new hierarchy of faith.”5
As Crane rediscovers Modern America, he rediscovers himself. His poetry pioneers his understanding of being human and being a poet in a changing world. The poet as the herald of a
new faith is quintessentially Romantic. In “A Defence of Poetry” Shelley celebrates the poet’s
voice as a trumpet and prophet of his age:
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of
the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present […] Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the World.6 (DP 701)
Crane shares Shelley’s belief that poets can perform as the omniscient singers of humanity
and the prophetic hierophants of the future. The significance of the self became the central
tenet for much Romantic literature, and Crane drew heavily on this influence to perform his
own version of self-fashioning. Unlike Eliot’s claims that poetry should be “an escape from
personality,”7 Crane sought the place and significance of his self and individual voice in the
modern world, understanding his poetic role as a bridge-builder and path-maker to the ideal
future towards which America was striving. Like Whitman discovering “I am the acme of
things accomplish’d, and I am encloser of things to be,”8 (SM XLIV) Crane does not only sing
America into being through his poetry, but sings himself into being through the text.
Yet Crane’s aspirations were undercut by doubts and anxieties as he questioned his sense
of being and self-as-poet in a time that seemed to reject Romantic values and his own literary
talents. Struggling to get published and aware he did not fit in with the style of his contemporary literary milieu, Crane was troubled by his poetic identity, role and the social significance of his voice. Yet in setting himself in “contrast and comparison” with past writers,
to use Eliot’s phrase,9 Crane experienced what Harold Bloom calls “anxiety of influence”.10
He reveals an anxiety that his poetry and his self become merely “shred ends” (V V. 7) from
3 Hart Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1965), 110.
4 The American Transcendentalism is a legacy of Romanticism. (The term was derived from
Immanuel Kant, a major influence in European Romanticism.) As Emerson explains: “there
was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but
through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he
denominated them Transcendental forms.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,”
The Complete Prose Works (London: Ward-Lock, n.d.), 391. All quotations from Emerson’s
works will be taken from this volume.
5 Crane, “General Aims and Theories,” 162.
6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” The Major Works, eds. and introd. Zachary Leader
and Michael O’Neill, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 682. All
quotations from Shelley’s works will be taken from this volume.
7 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, 68. All
quotations from Eliot’s essay will be taken from this volume.
8 Walt Whitman, A Choice of Whitman’s Verse, ed. and introd. Donald Hall (London: Faber,
1968), 73. All quotations from Whitman’s poetry will be taken from this volume.
9 Eliot, 61. The sentence in full reads: “You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for
contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
10 Harold Bloom, “Introduction: A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis,” The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1997), 1.
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
remembered literary stars that outshine him in significance and vision.11 In a letter to Waldo
Frank about his epic masterpiece The Bridge, Crane questions his adequacy as a poet in the
modern day writing in the shadow of the past:
The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its
worth and vision that I’m at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real
links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it.12
Yet Crane was not simply overwhelmed by the past but emulates Pound’s Modernist maxim
“make it new” by transforming Romantic vision and themes into his poetic mythology of
modern America,13 finding an original voice while continuing tradition. Waldo Frank recognised that Crane was not merely an “epigone” but a “creative continuator,” writing: “Great
traditions are extended not by imitators but by original transformers.”14 Crane forges his being
through the role of original transformer, transmuting Romantic poetry into the modern day to
understand his own role as poet and as a human being.
In transforming and drawing upon Romanticism to understand being human and
his poetic self, to find an original voice and the future of his modern age, Crane enacts Walt
Whitman’s theory of the poet’s role: “The poet drags the dead out of their coffins and stands
them again on their feet … he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize
you.”15 Thus, Crane becomes a Romantic Modernist, performing a dialogue with Romantic
poetry to sing into reality his own spirit of the age.
Metallic Paradises and the Groans of Death: “For the Marriage
of Faustus and Helen”
“For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”16 traces Crane’s evolving understanding of his own
being as he searches for his poetic vision, voice and self by drawing upon literary heritage
to formulate mythology and order out of the “confused cosmos of today.”17 By turning to the
past to make sense of the confusion of his culture and age, Crane seeks to comprehend his
own perplexity on how to be human. In a letter he explained: “The whole poem is a kind of
fusion of our own time with the past.”18 Crane draws together past and present, fusing Romanticism and Modernism to gain fresh insight into the problem of being in the world.
Crane searches for the Greek “emotional attitude toward beauty”19 and Romantic idealisation of love, imagination and poetic originality in an age rendered sterile and routine by
quotidian “memoranda, baseball scores,” “stenographic smiles and stock quotations” (FH I.
5-6). The opening of the poem is set in an uninspirational office and the poet’s relationship
11 Hart Crane, “Voyages,” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon, Centennial
Edition (New York: Liveright, 2001), 38. All quotations from Hart Crane’s poetry will be taken
from this volume.
12 Crane, Letters, 232.
13 Rebecca Beasley, “Origins of Modernism,” Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E.
Hulme, Ezra Pound, Routledge Critical Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2007), 19.
14 Waldo Frank, “Hart Crane,” The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart
Crane, by Hart Crane, ed. and introd. Brom Weber (New York: Anchor, 1966), 270.
15 Walt Whitman, “Preface to 1855 Edition of ‘Leaves of Grass,’” “Leaves of Grass” and Selected
Prose ed. and introd. Sculley Bradley (New York: Rinehart, 1949), 460.
16 Hereafter referred to as “Faustus and Helen”.
17 Crane, “General Aims and Theories,” 161.
18 Crane, Letters, 120-1.
19 Crane, “General Aims and Theories,” 161.
26
Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
with those around him is devoid of meaning: smiles and conversation are unemotional and
reduced to shorthand and insignificance. Eliot’s portrayal of relationships is similarly sterile,
caused by the lack of moral stricture and collapse of post-war London. The sexual reunion of
the typist and clerk in The Waste Land is unloving and dull; she is “bored and tired” and he
“makes a welcome of indifference”20 (WL III. 236-42). Crane echoes this empty portrayal of
relationships to highlight modernity’s vacuity as the antithesis of Romantic treatment of love
as sublime, quasi-religious, and the route to complete realisation of the self through another.
Without love and engaging significantly with others, Crane questions what the self is and how
meaningful is it to be human. Crane begins to uncover this as he recovers the significance of
love in the modern day through his Romantic search for the ideal, transcending the quotidian
into the abstract and universal via the poetic imagination.
Edelman reads the “memoranda” and “stock quotations” as metaphors for the plethora of
texts of Crane’s literary forefathers. He writes: “They evoke a world crowded by earlier texts,
a world overwhelmed by written material.”21 Yet Crane did not perceive the texts of his literary predecessors as quotidian “memoranda”; to him the “memoranda” evoke Modern poetry
that he sees as commonplace and unimaginative compared with the poetry of the past. In
this poem, Modern consciousness does not undergo a sublime flight of imagination to reach
a euphoric sense of being and communion with the self like the Romantic Keats on his
“viewless wings of Poesy” (ON 33).22 Instead, it is simply “brushed by sparrow wings,” (FH
I. 8) the modern day’s mundane equivalent of the self’s unification with the spirit of poetry,
represented by the nightingale in Keats’s ode. In “Faustus and Helen” Crane reveals his anxiety over his identity as a poet, finding originality in Modern poetry impossible to achieve. He
describes contemporary literature as “stock quotations,” and in a letter he writes:
Unless one has some new, intensely personal viewpoint to record [...] I say, why
write about it? Nine chances out of ten, if you know where in the past to look,
you will find words already written in the more-or-less exact tongue of your soul.
And the complaint to be made against nine out of ten poets is just this, - that
you are apt to find their sentiments much better expressed perhaps four hundred
years [having] passed.23
Finding an original voice was crucial to Crane’s sense of self-as-poet and his understanding
of being human. This quest made his poetry fraught with anxiety and ambivalence: he draws
upon Romanticism to find a voice to make sense of the present, yet finds that poetry of the
past renders his voice weak in comparison, worrying his is a poetry of imitation as opposed
to innovation.24 This anxiety of identity suffered by poets suffused by their literary legacies is
traced by John Beer: “Once poets are troubled by a presentiment that all the possible great
works have been achieved” they are left with “a sense of inadequacy as a new premium is
set on originality.”25
20 T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, gen. ed. M. H.
Abrams, 7th ed., vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 2377. All quotations from The Waste
Land will be taken from this volume.
21 Lee Edelman, “‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,’” Transmemberment of Song: Hart
Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987),
81.
22 John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” Selected Poems, ed. and introd. John Barnard, Penguin
Classics (London: Penguin, 1988), 170. All quotations from Keats’s poetry will be taken from
this volume.
23 Crane, Letters, 67.
24 See footnote 15.
25 John Beer, “Flowings,” Romantic Influencings: Contemporary – Victorian – Modern (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1993), 2.
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
“Faustus and Helen” shares similarities with Keats’s Hyperion poems in their mutual fear
of being too late in the literary tradition to create anything anew. Hyperion: A Fragment reveals Keats’s anxiety that his poetry will never equal that of his predecessors like John Milton.
Saturn, symbol of the old order of poetry,26 is overthrown by the new poetic voice, Jupiter.
When Thea comforts Saturn Keats worries that his “feeble tongue” cannot reproduce her
words and his poetry is inferior to his predecessors, complaining: “O how frail / To that large
utterance of the early Gods!” (H I. 49-50) He feels that his poem, cast in the convention of
a Miltonic epic, “Scorches and burns our once serene domain” because Saturn’s lightning,
representing Milton’s style, is in his “unpractised hands” (H I. 62-3). Keats was so tortured
by this sense of inadequacy that he abandoned the poem. Similarly, Crane believes his poetry and his location of the modern city cannot create poetry sufficient to discover ideals of
beauty and love: “Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd / The margins of the day, accent the
curbs” (FH I. 9-10). The quotidian world of urban America does not nurture poetry-making:
“numbers,” a common Romantic synonym for poetry, are “rebuffed” or rejected by asphalt of
the dull city, symbol of the hard and rough reception of Crane’s poetry by his contemporaries
and publishers. Poetic creativity is shunned to the “margins of the day” in a world where work
and money-making take precedence, emphasising, or accenting, the restrictions and curbs
his age places on his poetry. The world’s rejection of his voice marginalises Crane, sparking
his identity as a poet as a mode through which he learns to re-conceive of being human in
fractured modern society.
Yet Crane suggests that his poetry is not simply restricted by the modern city, but can in
fact make it beautiful and transcendent. “Rebuffed” does not only mean rejected but repolished or shined. In this light, his poetic numbers are re-made and beautified by quotidian
asphalt, the day becomes a page whose margins are crowded with poetry, and the homophone
“curbs” comes to mean the edge of the pavement that is accented and made significant by
poetry. Crane was inspired by the modern city and uses his imagination to invigorate it and
make it sublime. This endeavour reveals a faith that humans, through poetry, have the power
to make the mundane beautiful, and endow the world with significance. Crane’s belief is
shared by the Romantic poets whose understanding of the individual’s mind creating the
world we perceive put into motion the exultant belief in the human self and its power not only
to find meaning in a confusing cosmos, but to create it.
Crane’s renewed belief in the power of the human is similar to Keats’s epiphany as he
composed the Hyperion poems. Following his abandonment of the first Hyperion, Keats started a second, casting aside his Miltonic objectivity and making his self the focus. The Fall of
Hyperion: A Dream narrates Keats’s realisation that he can ascend the steps to the temple
of the deposed Titans; 27 inspired by Moneta, his muse and figure of imagination, his poetry
becomes adequate to enter him into the pantheon of poetic gods of the past. Crane’s realisation that his voice is capable of trumpeting his vision of the present gives way to a change
of movement in the third stanza of “Faustus and Helen.” Instead of worrying that his words
cannot live up to poetry of the past, he releases his imagination and allows experience of the
present moment to absorb and engage his mind in his search for ideal beauty:
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall, - lost yet poised in traffic. (FH I. 19-21)
26 Hereafter referred to as Hyperion.
27 Hereafter referred to as The Fall of Hyperion.
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Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
Crane’s subway ride represents the journey of his imagination. He forgets the “fare” or economic concerns of modernity and the “transfer” or route of his contemporaries whose realism
Crane found shattered the beauty, transcendence and potential ideals of the world,28 and
allows his imagination to become his poetic vehicle or subway taking him into the sublime
abstract in his search for beauty. He becomes “lost yet poised in traffic,” poised between his
invigorating direct experience of the modern world and the Romantic technique of using the
imagination to transmute felt experience and sensations into deeper visionary insight. Crane
saw “reacting honestly” to the immediate world essential in giving the poet a “picture of his
‘period’” that would then become “a by-product of his curiosity and the relation of his experience to a postulated ‘eternity.’”29 This idea of understanding the human in relation to ideals
such as eternity by charting the self’s reacting to current sensations echoes Keats’s belief
that truth is found in direct sense experience and feelings: “for axioms in philosophy are not
axioms till they are proved upon our pulses.”30
Keats questions his own assertion on the importance of direct experience in the context
of the place of art in relation to being human. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” he celebrates the
immortality of art; the lovers on the urn “cannot fade,” but their human existence is limited
because they cannot experience real passion: “never canst thou kiss” (GU ll.17-9). Crane
undergoes a similar “struggle to free the transcendent without losing the immediate world,”31
yet he overcomes this Romantic dichotomy of human experience versus art by coalescing
experience with imagination:
There is some way, I think, to touch
Those hands of yours that count the nights
Stippled with pink and green advertisements (FH I. 26-8).
Through this poised mode of poetics Crane finds Helen, symbol of ideal love and beauty,
on the modern subway. Through his imagination he not only finds, but touches beauty in the
quotidian world of the city. Helen also comes to represent imagination and poetry that adorn
the present age as her counting hands make beautiful the commercialism, the “stippled
pink and green advertisements,” of modern America that Crane previously wanted to escape
and forget. Through this image of Helen’s hands and the second implication of clock hands
that count the night, Crane coalesces intimacy with abstraction; he combines the human
sensation of touch as he reaches to grasp and understand ideals of beauty and love, time and
eternity.
Crane’s discovery of ideal love is met with Byronic fatalism. Crane finds human experience and ideal abstractions are a dangerous combination as his poetry expresses the dark
realisation that love will not remain joyous and pure, but will turn violent and cease:32 “And
28 For example, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
29 Crane, “General Aims and Theories,” 162.
30 John Keats, Keats: Poetry and Prose, ed. Henry Ellershaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1960) 172.
31 Alan Trachtenberg, introduction to Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alan
Trachtenberg (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 3.
32 Byron often coalesces two opposing sentiments in one breath. For example fun and death are
shown to co-exist in his rhyming couplets in Beppo: “For sometimes they contain a deal of
fun, / Like mourning coaches when the funeral’s done.” (20. 159-60). Lord Byron, “Beppo,”
The Major Works, ed. and introd. Jerome McGann, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986) 321. All quotations from Byron’s poetry will be taken from this volume.
Despite finding love the ideal emotional experience, Romantic poets were continually aware of
its darker side and ephemeral nature. Byron’s celebration of love is often tainted by an image
of death or infidelity, Shelley’s Maniac in Julian and Maddalo devoted himself to “justice and
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
now, before its arteries turn dark / I would have you meet this bartered blood” (FH I. 29-30).
The image of “bartered blood” emphasises Crane’s likening of the poet figure to Faustus who
bartered his soul to the devil for sexual pleasure with Helen. As Faustus reaches the nadir of
his deception in his apparent intercourse with the devil spirit disguised as Helen, it creates
the finest poetry of the play. Marlowe engineers this irony to reveal the deceptions of apparent
beauty and poetry itself. Yet Faustus can see the beauty in Helen and worship and adore this
despite the cold realities, like Lycius in Keats’s Lamia deceived by a beautiful snake lover.
Crane, like Faustus, pursues Helen only to find it a deceptive and impossible aspiration; being human and only able to experience material reality appears to render ideals unreachable.
Helen’s love is difficult to maintain because his poetry, poised between the steel metropolis
of Manhattan and the virgin Indian soil from which it emerges, is: “too alternate / With steel
and soil to hold you endlessly” (FH I. 44-5). Crane finds himself in a “tragic quandary”
between steel and soil, modernity and the past, resulting from “the paradoxes that an inadequate system of rationality forces on the living consciousness.”33
To Crane, this was the flawed system of modernity that separated the human from the
ideal, and divided the experience of reality from imaginative transcendence. To bridge this lacuna and forge a greater understanding of being, Crane replaced this inadequate system with
the “logic” of imagination. In his theory of the “logic of metaphor,” he places significance
on the imagination to create images of “associated meanings” rather than rational “literal
significance.” In this way “the truth of the imagination” speaks with greater insight of his
age and direct human experience and feelings than Crane previously thought possible.34 This
theory sounds very much like Keats’s credo: “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must
be Truth.”35 Imagination is Crane’s route to the truth of beauty, and through this he can,
Faustus-like, suspend his rationality and appreciate beauty even in a moment of deception.
Pease argues that Crane attempted to “write his way out of the modernist dilemma,”36 yet, as
the rest of the poem confirms, Crane embraces the paradoxes of modernism and seeks to find
a new system of consciousness and being that lies not in rationality but in the imagination.
Part Two is the “dance and sensual culmination” of Crane’s search for love and beauty
through poetry. 37 He takes us from the subway to a dance, opera and roof garden, celebrating
the freedom and energy of the modern world through jazz rhythms and frenetic pace as the
movement of the “breathless” dancers’ feet intermingle with the metrical feet of the poem
itself: “Glee shifts from foot to foot,” (FH II. 2) the heavy spondee followed by two rising
iambs recreates the movement of dance steps. The dance captures Crane’s “tragic quandary”
and modernist dilemma: it at once provides “New soothings, new amazements,” sexual experience, and the sensations that make us human, but is tempered “Through snarling hails
of melody” (FH II. 16, 10) an image that recalls the “silver, snarling trumpets” (ESA 31) of
Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes which act as a prophetic warning that chivalric and romantic love
cannot exist in its ideal form in the real world.38 Crane’s “opéra bouffe” turns tragic as sex is
coalesced with death as Crane becomes aware that love and sex do not remain ideal: “titters
hailed the groans of death / Beneath gyrating awnings” (FH II. 27-8). Crane, like Keats, aclove” but his love was lost and betrayed rendering his ideals “worthless now,” (JM 381-33)
and the fantasy love Keats’s knight encounters in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is woven by a
demon lover’s spell that leaves him “Alone and palely loitering” (BD 46).
33 Crane, Letters and Prose, 226.
34 Crane, “General Aims and Theories,” 164-5.
35 Keats, Letters, ed. Ellershaw, 164-5.
36 Donald Pease, “Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility,” PMLA
96 no.1 (1981): 64-85, 5 June 2008 <http://uk.jstor.org/search> 66.
37 Crane, Letters, 120-1.
38 Hereafter referred to as St Agnes.
30
Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
cepts the dissolution of ideals, learning it is the “soothings” and “amazements” of real life
feelings that make us human and alive to the experiences of the world by their very virtue of
being divorced from ideal abstractions. Crane, however, is continuously reminded that human
feelings are also full of suffering. “The groans of death” recall the intrusion of death and
pain into Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “where men sit and hear each other groan” (ON
24). The dance whirls Crane into a vision of death-in-life. He sees sex and death, tragedy
and “titters” of laughter grotesquely compounding with sexual and deathly groans. Being human, he learns, is a complex and inseparable mix of pleasure and pain. Helen returns at the
end of this section, but she has been turned from a figure of ideal love into a luring siren “of
guilty song” (FH II. 31). Ideal love has been transmuted into guilty and sinful sex and Helen,
also the figure of poetry, has deceived and ensnared Crane as he finds his poetic perceptions
of ideal love and beauty fail in reality. This is similar to Keats’s poet figure Endymion who
falls in love with poetry, represented by the moon goddess, Cynthia, only to be disillusioned:
“Where all that beauty snared me” […] “With siren words” (En II. 952-5). Crane’s fancy,
like the Keats’s nightingale “cannot cheat so well”, (ON 73) and his claim that imaginative
flights bring ideals into reality is rendered a fallacy and destroyed. The human and imaginative realms remain separate.
Part Three sees Crane attempt to bridge this gap by using poetry and the imagination to
make both ideals and realities come together to explore the richness of being human. This
section is described by Crane as “the acceptance of tragedy through destruction” and he
purges his tragic vision of love turned sour through imagery of the First World War and the
fall of Troy to achieve creation-out-of-destruction. 39 Before Crane can create a deeper understanding and gain greater insight into America, his age and being human, he purges history
and his imagination of its failings. Crane uses a war pilot to represent modernity’s violent
destruction of ideals: “We drove speediest destruction / in Corymbulous formations of mechanics” (FH III. 12-3). Crane integrates warfare of the past and present to depict history as
cyclical and dependent upon destruction and chaos to enable the birth of new visions, human
potential and progression.40 Rebirth out of death is the crux of Keats’s Hyperion: Oceanus
declares his faith in the natural process of the death of the old reign and ascension of new:
For ’tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
Yea, by that law, another race may drive
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now (H II. 224-31).
Crane’s “speediest destruction” is a cathartic release of his despair at the destroyed ideals
of modernity, represented by war. This gives way to the realisation that imagination is the
means through which the poet “conquerors” are the new race that bring beauty and can make
“metallic paradises” (FH II. 24) out of modernity.41 Through the “lavish heart” of love the
new generation of America can “leaven” the age and humanity with a refreshed spirituality,
spread by the “bells and voices” of poetry and the imagination (recalling Keats’s means of
worshipping beauty and the soul “With buds, and bells” of poetry and imagination in “Ode
to Psyche” [OP 61]), and atone for the “shadows” of the war (FH III. 33-5). The final “restatement of the imagination”42 comes as Crane is able to “praise the years” (FH III. 45) of
America’s violent past, understanding war as necessary for the evolution of the nation and
39 Crane Letters, 120-1.
40 Like Shelley’s description of the wind, symbol of poetic inspiration and its power, “Destroyer
and Preserver” in “Ode to the West Wind” (WW 14).
41 See Keats’s Hyperion quotation above.
42 Crane, Letters, 120-1.
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
its people. Crane’s faith in poetry and his imagination is no longer centred on his individual
understanding of being human, but reveals an insight into humanity at large.
The image of threshing in this section depicts the violent poetic process of creation-outof-destruction in the same way as threshing in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” shows violence to
be invigorating rather than destructive. It represents the power of imaginative creativity: the
“mighty fountain” of the imagination is “forced” and “Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail” (KK 19-22). Through the imagination
Crane can envision his age to outpace the “bargain” and materiality of his culture and modern
man, and find greater significance through poetry that becomes like a “prayer” or religion that
is “vocable” or capable of speaking to his age (FH III. 48). Imagination is the faculty that
marries the poet and intellect, Faustus, with ideal beauty and love, Helen, to find “A thing
of beauty is a joy forever” (En I. 1), in Keats’s words. It is key to being human and a poet: it
has the power not only to provide a vision of the present, it “spans beyond” (FH III. 47) and
allows Crane to transcend his despair of modernity and envisage the future with a renewed
and optimistic faith in the potential of America, its people, and the self as it is born out of
the past.
Syllables of Faith Lend a Myth to God: “The Bridge”
The Bridge is the apotheosis of Crane’s poetics of Romantic Modernism as he continues
his journey to discover the self and being. His final volume is an epic of the Romantic and
Modern consciousness as he forms his identity as poet: his search for meaning in the world
through his poetic voice and the imagination renders the volume Romantic, yet his accumulation of literary echoes from the past, celebration of machinery and the city, and drive to find
a new poetic voice to fit the age reinforces its place in the genre of Modernism.
Crane converges past and present not only to form his own sense of being but to create
an epic history of American consciousness. He scrambles chronology to produce an assimilated and realistic vision of human experience and America’s history showing, as he wrote to
Otto Kahn, “the continuous and living evidence of the past in the in-most vital substance of
the present.”43 Revealing the living past in the “vital substance” of the present was the way
Crane believed he could build a bridge to envision the future. Vogler defines the epic form
as the search “for a vision of change, a prophecy of a better future state. The theme, goal,
and motive of the poet merge in a vision of spiritual regeneration that will lead to a state of
permanent enlightenment.”44 Crane sees his role as a Shelleyan “hierophant,” portending an
ideal future, or Atlantis, to discover the “as yet undefined spiritual quantities” of America
and being human. 45
Crane reveals a faith in the human voice and mind, believing “poetic prophecy” to be “a
peculiar type of perception, capable of apprehending some absolute and timeless concept
of the imagination with astounding clarity and conviction.”46 Brooklyn Bridge is the means
through which Crane’s vision is framed: “Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge” (TBB 31).
The bridge to enlightenment is built through imaginative evocation of the past in the present
that can also “span beyond” into a timeless and absolute perception and vision of the future.
43 Crane, Letters and Prose, 248.
44 Thomas A. Vogler, “In Search of the Epic,” Preludes to Vision: The Epic Venture in Blake,
Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart Crane (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 6.
45 See footnote 5.
46 Crane, Letters and Prose, 262-3.
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Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
The “ideal Word” which overcomes the temporality of love at the end of Voyages does not
satisfy Crane’s search for his vision, voice and self. He seeks the universal ideal of Atlantis to
provide a poetic vision and voice that does sing of his personal experience of being human,
and can also encompass America’s being, its people, present, past and future.
Like Shelley’s Alastor, The Bridge is the epic of the poet in search for his self-as-poet,
spiritual understanding, and impact his human voice can have on his world. As Bloom notes
“the transformation of lyric into epic was a Romantic praxis long before it was Modernist.”47
When the Poet dies on his quest in Alastor the Narrator yearns that poetry, “the dream / Of
dark magician in his visioned cave” had power over death and “were the true law / Of this so
lovely world!” (A 681-686). Crane, however, seeks to overcome this tragic vision, refusing
Vogler’s account of the epic poet to “accept defeat;”48 he seeks to overcome Shelley’s despair
in divine vacancy,49 invoking his bridge of poetry and imagination: “And of the curveship lend
a myth to God” (TBB 44). This yearning brings to light Bloom’s observation of American writers: “we (or at least most of our post-Emersonian poets) tend to see our fathers as not having
dared enough.”50 Shelley and Crane were both daring poets, producing visions that vaulted
and spanned beyond their ages, and Crane draws upon his Romantic legacy to dare even
further into the future. Crane has faith in the potential of his poetry and creative powers; the
bridge’s “teeming span!”51 (B I. AM 72) echoes Keats’s “teeming brain” (WHF 2). In “Ave
Maria,” Crane uses Columbus as a figural representation of the poet who discovers the new
world of modern America and brings his new-found vision to Europe. He announces: “I bring
you back Cathay!” (B I. AM 8) representing “consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity” found
by the poet. 52 Crane likens being a poet to being a voyager. He is exiled because of his radical
and daring visions, like Columbus who was disbelieved by those who thought the earth was
flat: “I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved, / That made me exile in her streets” (B
I. AM 17-8). The aim of Crane’s epic is to find some truths of life, being and America which
are proven worthy through his poetry and imagination and understand its significance. Crane
shares Blake’s view of the prophetic visionary truth of the imagination, recalling the axiom:
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”53
Crane re-visions and enlivens the past to mythologise modern America in the same way
that Perkins envisions the purpose of mythology, to award “a significance lacking in a world
deprived of myth”.54 Crane uses the Eliotic “mythical method” to manipulate “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” as he converges America’s Indian past
with the present.55 Crane uses the sea to re-pioneer and voyage the Indian world and its
human mythology to transmute its significance into modern consciousness. He is “between
47 Harold Bloom, “Centenary Introduction,” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, xviii.
48 Vogler, 6.
49 Of course, Shelley’s poem is not entirely pessimistic and tragic; although the Narrator laments
the seemingly insignificant effect the Poet had on the world, he has “adorned” the world and
left things “not as they were.” (A 715-20).
50 Bloom, “Tessera or Completion and Antithesis,” The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 68.
51 B represents the volume The Bridge, the number the part, and individual poems will be placed
in initials next to this (see list of abbreviations of poetry titles).
52 Crane, Letters and Prose, 241.
53 William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Selected Poetry, ed. and introd. Michael
Mason, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 77.
54 David Perkins, “T. S. Eliot: The Early Career,” A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to
the High Modernist Mode, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1976),
507.
55 Perkins, 64-5. Eliot used the phrase “mythical method” in his review of James Joyce’s
Ulysses.
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
two worlds,” poised between two states of being: the humans of the past that made America,
and the humans of the present that have the power to build its future. This suspension of
consciousness is also a metaphor for poetic navigation, the creative and mental space that
spans past and present, it “tests the word” and “Merges wind in measure to the waves” (B I.
AM 32-40) punning measure with poetic measure. Shelley’s self-as-poet is reflected in nature
and the wider universal scheme, like the Alastor Poet who sees himself and his quest in the
stream: “Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course / Have each their type in me” (A 5078). Crane’s poetry and self is merged with nature as his vision becomes part of the waves and
prairie sod of which he sings. Human thought becomes identified with the body of America in
the same way that Emerson claimed: “The Universe is the externisation of the soul.”56
This state of balance “between two worlds” recalls Crane being “lost yet poised in traffic” in “Faustus and Helen,” a state that enables him to become suspended between the
Romantic and Modern modes of seeking experience and imagination. This state of balance is
found in The Waste Land and Crane becomes like Eliot, a Tiresias figure, “between two lives”
(WL 218). He is poised between Greek myth and the modern city, blind yet able to become
a voice of the future as he prefigures and envisions the collapsed modern city. In his search
for America’s Atlantis, Crane is a figure between two worlds, using the past to understand
and create a vision of the future, revealing the impact an individual human voice can have
on the world.
In “Van Winkle” he journeys to his childhood – the origins of his being, representing the
gradual recession of the poem into America’s history. Crane uses the figure of Rip Van Winkle
not only to evoke childhood, but to write American folklore into the European literary tradition so Van Winkle becomes another character synonymous with the identity of the poet.
Crane uses Van Winkle who “was not here / nor there”57 (B II. VW 31-2) to understand the
importance of balancing tradition and heritage with change and modernity, and also to use
literature from the past and America’s history to establish tradition while incorporating and
appreciating the changing modern world. Crane comes to understand that this is also the key
to evolving as a human and poet. He undergoes a poetic Bildungsroman58 and realises that
he must leave his childhood as “memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box” and accept the
future: “hurry along, Van Winkle – it’s getting late!” in the same way the bridge “Leaps from
Far Rockaway to Golden Gate” (B II. VW 33-45), spanning the past, present and future in
one vast sweep.
Crane does not allow the “loose and open-endedness” of America and his quest for self
to lead to despair. He evokes the roaring and rushing river that becomes an express train to
embrace modernity and aid his search for a significant poetic vision that fits his age. The
jazz and fragmented rhythms of the opening stanza recall The Waste Land in its depiction of
urban chaos:
SCIENCE – COMMERCE and the HOLYGHOST
RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME WE HAVE THE NORTHPOLE
WALLSREET AND THE VIRGINBIRTH WITHOUT STONES OR
WIRES OR EVEN RUNning brooks connecting ears59 (B II. TR 13-6)
56 Emerson, “The Poet,” 95.
57 Italics are Crane’s.
58 Although this means ‘formation novel’ [J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms
and Literary Theory, 4th ed. (London: Penguin, 1999) 81], the term seems apt to apply to
Crane’s development through youth.
59 Capitalisation is Crane’s.
34
Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
The metamorphosis of river into express train represents Crane’s process of using the modern day in conjunction with the past to transport us back to the Mid West to the time of the
Indians. Crane intended this section to be a “burlesque on the cultural confusion of the
present,”60 sharing the same intentions as Eliot to reveal the barrenness and sterility of being
human in the modern world, corrupted by war and lacking in a spiritual vision. The spiritual
plane of America, “holyghost” and “virginbirth,” becomes interchanged with commerce and
radio to reveal that modern society lacks a spiritual identity and direction. Yet Crane has
faith in the modern city to provide a spiritual plateau for its people, and the telephone wires
that span the mountain become like the bridge and “Bind town to town and dream to ticking
dream” (B II. TR 27). The movement of the verse and river energises his search: “Poised
wholly on its dream, a mustard glow / Tortured with history, its one will – flow!” (B II. TR
141-2). Despite his anxiety that his “dreams” may not survive reality, he retains a driving
belief that he will find Atlantis and a spiritual vision as the river “hosannas silently below”
(B II. TR 144).
“The Dance” continues his search for the lost Indians of America’s past, the country’s
originators of being. He travels along the river to the spring in a similar way to the Poet in
Alastor who seeks the spring in his search for knowledge, and the origins of the self and
poetry. Pocahontas becomes a spirit of poetry like the “veiléd maid” in Shelley’s poem. She
is a synecdoche for the body and soul of America, and is absorbed into the alliteration and
words of the poem: “Her hair’s warm sibilance” (B II. D 95). The dance merges with the storm
in a movement of Sturm und Drang,61 which represents the conflict between colonisers and
Indians.62 Through the battle Crane becomes “identified with the Indian and his world” which
he felt was “the only method possible of ever really possessing the Indian and his world as
a cultural factor.”63 Crane begins to find his poetic self among the Indians of the past, the
creators of America’s human consciousness and spirituality. He uses the first person narrative
and in “Indiana” he becomes a part of the Indian family as he inhabits their consciousness
and sense of being to understand his own: “I huddled in the shade / Of wagon-tenting” (B II.
I 29-30). Crane uses the river Maquokeeta with the force and energy of the storm to “dance
us back the tribal morn!” taking us to the Indian past in order to experience and discover the
origins of the future. The river is like a snake that “casts his pelt, and lives beyond!” (B II. TD
58-60). At the end of this poem, however, the colonisers become associated with the symbol
of the snake. They have ensnared Pocahontas, and the sacrifice of her cultural heritage and
identity in marrying John Rolfe, which symbolises the founding of modern America, represented by the eagle: “The serpent with the eagle in the boughs” (B II. TD 104). Crane uses
these symbols in a Blakean antithetical way; the image of the snake does not only represent
the sin and temptation of the colonisers, but connotes the possibility of the renewal they bring
to America because, like the river, it sheds its skin to grow bigger and live on. Similarly, the
eagle is at once a bird of beauty and a bird of prey; modern America has destroyed its Indian
past but portends its potential to regenerate and become stronger.64
60 Crane, Letters and Prose, 251.
61 “Storm and stress,” The term is used to describe a German Romantic movement of thought.
62 In a similar way to the tumult of poetic creativity in “Kubla Khan” that takes him back to
primeval origins of destruction: “And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices
prophesying war!” (KK 29-30).
63 Crane, Letters and Prose, 251.
64 Blake used antithetical symbols to carry out his belief: “Without contraries is no progression.
Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence”
(MHH 74).
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
If Pocahontas is the body of America, or the land, Whitman is the “spiritual body of
America”.65 Crane believed that poets of the past have a spiritual and religious role to play in
the mythologising of America, like Shelley’s belief that poets are the “hierophants” of “unapprehended inspiration.”66 Whitman provides “syllables of faith” (B IV. CH 47) to a modern
world that seems to lack an adequate mode of religion. He becomes another manifestation
of the symbol of the bridge, bringing Crane back “To that deep wonderment, our native clay”
(B IV. CH 18) and acting as a spiritual link between the present and the origins of being.
Whitman stands immortal and immutable like the bridge: “But that star-glistered salver of
infinity, / The circle, blind crucible of endless space” (B IV. CH 32-3) unlike the modern day
which makes space “instantaneous” and sees man as “an atom in a shroud” amid the age
of engines and “shifting gears,” where “Dream cancels dream in this new realm of fact” (B
IV. CH 43-6). This recalls Keats’s mourning of a lost mysticism of the past in his contemporary day where philosophy, or science, became a dominant mode of thinking and means of
attributing meaning to the world, asking: “Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold
philosophy?” Factual and reasoned thinking shatters the once “awful rainbow” (L II. 229-31)
by providing answers to the unexplained wonders of being human and the world, and thus
limits meaning.67
In some ways Crane views his modern day and self-as-poet as failing the Romantic vision
of Whitman, a “Saunterer on free ways still ahead!” (B IV. CH 54) who sang of an America
with freedom and potential with teeming confidence in his self as a spiritual pioneer: “I am
the Body and I am the poet of the Soul” (SM XXI). Crane wrote to Frank expressing anxiety
that the reality of present America has not lived up to Whitman’s intimations:
If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke
of it fifty years ago there might be something for me to say – not that Whitman
received or required any tangible proof of his intimations, but that time has
shown how increasingly lonely and ineffectual his confidence stands.68
Yet Crane wanted to sing of his America and the experience of being human with optimism,
unlike the pessimism he found in The Waste Land. Although the modern age is in the throes
of engines and machinery that demystify and automate spirituality and transcendence, Crane
celebrates the power and energy of the machine-age with excitement that emulates Whitman’s voice. The new American frontier that Crane pioneers through his poetry and imagination is not the “statured” cliffs and “abandoned pastures” of Whitman’s journeys, but the
“world of stocks” and “canyoned traffic” (B IV. CH 58-61). His language and rhythm is full
of the movement and energy of this fast-moving society: “The nasal whine of power whips a
new universe,” “fast in whirling armatures,” (B IV. CH 63, 73) and he sees his age and poetic
potential as “bobbin-bound,” ready to unwind.
The soldiers in the biplane represent the poet’s desire to continue Whitman’s vision and
quest to voyage America in conjunction with his own being, seeking their potential and meaning: Whitman and the poets of the past are represented as “Stars” like the “remembered
stars” of Voyages who “scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas” of poetry gone before, “The
gleaming cantos of unvanquished space” (B IV. CH 79-80). Crane wants his new poetry to
be like the “blading” and “veering” biplane to find “new latitudes” and achieve “marathons
65 Crane, Letters and Prose, 241.
66 See footnote 6.
67 In a review of The Ghetto and Other Poems by Lola Ridge, Crane wrote: “science has brought
light – but it threatens to destroy the idea of reverence, the source of all light.” Crane, Letters
and Prose, 201.
68 Crane, Letters and Prose, 232.
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Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
new-set between the stars!” (B IV. CH 87) He does not want it to become “shred ends,” but
part of the pantheon of the “stars” or writers of the past, as Keats achieves in ascending the
steps in The Fall of Hyperion. In his desire to bridge and further his American and Romantic
legacy through his conception of the self-as-poet, Crane seeks to dare beyond Whitman’s vision, the metaphoric pioneer of new and fertile spiritual lands. He seeks to elevate America’s
spirituality, using the plane as a symbol for the new soul of the modern age: “The soul, by
naphtha fledged into new reaches / Already knows the closer clasp of Mars” (B IV. CH 88-9).
The coalescence of petrol and dynamos with Romantic imagery of the soul transcending to
new heights allows Crane to give a sublime basis to his age of stocks, machines and urbanity.
The notion of the soul taking flight in a moment of epiphanic ecstasy is at the heart of Keats’s
Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley’s To a Skylark.
Crane’s plane becomes a modern manifestation of the human soul, but also becomes the
soul of poetry – the imagination – like Keats’s nightingale whose immortal song represents the
eternal and transcendental powers of poetry amid a world of “weariness,” “fever” and “fret”:
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” (ON 23, 61) Similarly, Shelley’s rising skylark
represents the soul in ecstasy, it is “Like an unbodied joy” (TS 15) and the long lines at the
end of each stanza enact the rising up and up of the skylark. The bird is also the symbol of
poetic composition, like the nightingale:
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden (TS 36-8).
The flight of Crane’s plane, however, comes to an abrupt end as it is bombed. The modern
day can only bring a limited amount of transcendence to human spirituality, and the First
World War becomes an example of the failed promise of Whitman’s vision of a land that
gives freedom to humanity with greater potential to come. The soldiers whose “Wings clip
the last peripheries of light” suddenly become a “bunched heap of high bravery!” (B IV. CH
106, 155) The form of Crane’s poem becomes the opposite of the rising movement of Shelley’s ode; Crane’s fragmented and dropped lines disperse and break up the form to mirror
the action of the crashing plane. Where Keats and Shelley looked to nature to find spiritual
elevation for the self and to represent their powers of imagination and poetry, Crane looks to
the man-powered machinery of the modern day to promote the potential of being human and
celebrate the transformative self.
Whitman has built a bridge from his age to “Years of the Modern!” and becomes the dynamic energy propelling the machines of the age forward. Crane’s anxiety that modern man
cannot live up to the vision and consciousness of the poets who have gone before culminates
in the crash of the plane. But this transmutes into a moment of anagnorisis when walking
along Brooklyn Bridge and he realises:
To course that span of consciousness thous’t named
The Open Road – thy vision is reclaimed!
What heritage thou’st signalled to our hands! (B IV. CH 220-2)
Crane believes he can continue the legacy of Whitman, and the actual bridge provides the
pathway through which Crane realises Whitman’s bridge of human consciousness, poetry and
vision that spans the “hiatus” and void of the modern day.69 Crane suddenly sees the “rainbow’s arch” shimmering; through Whitman, Crane can re-weave Keats’s “awful rainbow”. He
69 Like Whitman’s poetic mind spans the “vast Rondure” of the earth in “Passage to India”: “Now
first it seems my thought begins to span thee.” (PI 7)
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
ends the poem with the belief that he can continue Whitman’s legacy, as they walk hand in
hand, an image that recalls Keats’s hand extending to the reader to demonstrate the immortality of poetry: “- see here it is - / I hold it towards you” (TLH 7-8).
Crane travels on the subway whose tunnel becomes a form of purgatory before reaching
“Atlantis,” which represents the triumph of the human imagination and his poetry in seeking and singing modern America. His own poem becomes identified with the structure and
framework of the bridge: “New octaves trestle the twin monoliths” representing the “loft of
vision”, no longer the “shred ends of stars” but the “palladium helm of stars” (B VIII. At 1824). Atlantis is the ideal that Crane has now reached, the “Vision-of-the-Voyage,” (B VIII. At
42) and reflects upon the very journey and process of The Bridge volume itself, understanding
that by drawing on Romanticism he has synthesised the past of America with the present to
produce poetry which has the power to build a bridge to the future:
translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables, - Psalm of Cathay! (B VIII. At 44-7)
Crane has reached his Cathay – he has gained knowledge of the past, understood the
consciousness of modernity, and found spiritual unity through the imaginative process of
writing his poem. The “synergy” of his poetry comes from the recasting of Romanticism and
interconnection with modernism to build a bridge between the past and the present that has
the ability to span to the future, a spiritual and meaningful pathway for the people of America.
Lewis recognises The Bridge as “unique in being the only large-scale work of literature in its
generation which, in the light of that event, is finally concerned not with the death of God but
with the birth of God.”70 Although Crane does not appear to believe in the Christian God, like
Shelley, he reveals an agnostic openness to a divine transcendental alternative to orthodox
religion that enriches our being, here realised in Cathay.
Crane’s ending is not entirely positive and as soon as he asserts he has reached Cathay,
his Atlantis, with “One Song, one Bridge of Fire!” recalling the climactic oneness of Epipsychidion, he asks “Is it Cathay?” He returns to the image of the “serpent with the eagle in
the leaves” (B VIII. At 93-95) to indicate that his being and America are in the process of
reaching a sublime and transcendental ideal but have not yet arrived. Crane’s poem does not
descend into the annihilation of Shelley’s poem but does not sustain his affirmation in the
power of being human or of finding Cathay. Instead, his poetry, self, and modern America
are in the process of this transcendence; his vision, like the bridge, remains poised between
the two antiphonal strains of past and present, remaining “between two worlds”. Unlike the
end of Voyages, his poem becomes not so much an affirmation of Cathay, nor does it offer
a positive vision of the future, but “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing” (B VIII. At 96).
Crane remains poised in a state of Keatsian negative capability: he is open to “uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”71 It is this poise and
process, however, which Crane finds inspiring and although he has not firmly reached his
Cathay or Atlantis and a satisfactory self-discovery, he has glimpsed it and affirmed the power
of poetry and the human mind that he believes is the mode through which he and America
will arrive at Atlantis.
70 R. W. B. Lewis, “‘Proem’ and ‘Ave Maria’: The Post-Christian Idiom,” The Poetry of Hart Crane:
A Critical Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 285.
71 John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, ed. and intro. Robert Gittings (London:
Heinemann, 1966), 41.
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Hoyes – Hart Crane’s Search for Self and Being
What I Hold Healed, Original Now, and Pure: ‘The Broken
Tower’
“The Broken Tower” traces Crane’s disillusionment in being human and in his self-as-poet
from which he suffered towards the end of his career and life.72 Originality for Crane was
central to his poetic being, and his anxiety that he could not live up to the poets of the past
or write with an original voice (fears that he sought to dispel in Voyages and The Bridge) returns. He sees his literary predecessors as a corps of bell-ringers to whom he is “their sexton
slave” (BT 12); troubled he is an epigone and not a creative continuator,73 finding his word
“cognate.” Crane finds his poetry has not the transcendental voice and vision of ideals he
once believed, leaving him “cleft to despair” (BT 24). Tate’s criticism of Crane’s first volume,
White Buildings, has potency in the light of this poem: “The vision often strains and overreaches the theme” because “the existing poetic order no longer supports the imagination.”74
Crane’s reverence of the human imagination to support his vision was due to his critique of
the “inadequate system of rationality;”75 yet here, imagination seems to have failed him. His
search for an original voice and place among a great literary canon overreaches the ability
of his imagination and poetry. This overreaching leads to a breaking down of his personal vision altogether and so he enters the “broken world” of ringing poets “To trace the visionary
company of love” (BT 17-8) of his fellow poets to “track, copy, or emulate” the vision of his
predecessors. 76 As O’Neill observes:
In “the broken world,” Crane is outside any Romantic “world to which the
familiar world is as a chaos,” in Shelley’s words from A Defence of Poetry, and
in search of a lost wholeness, a search made possible by the experience of
fragmentation.77
For Crane, having an original voice was essential to being human and this becomes the
focus of his quest to realise his potential as a poet. In search of an original or “whole” voice,
Crane undergoes a process of fragmentation and destruction. His being and self becomes
a Shelleyan “portion” before he can become a whole, enabling him to create to meet his
vision.
Bloom argues Crane’s broken tower is an act of tessera in the quest “to become one’s own
Great Original.” 78 He writes: “We journey to abstract ourselves by fabrication. But where
the fabric already has been woven, we journey to unravel.”79 As Crane fragments the self, he
unravels and breaks down the tower of his literary forefathers in despair and disillusionment
that he cannot become a “Great Original.” Yet he breaks it down to build it up again with a
renewed vision of his own being, poetry and love. Through the ringing and pulsing of the bells
72 Crane is believed to have committed suicide at the age of 32.
73 See footnote 15.
74 Allen Tate, “Introduction to ‘White Buildings’,” Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays,
22.
75 See footnote 34.
76 Michael O’Neill, “The All-Sustaining Air”: Yeats, Stevens, Rich, Bishop – Responses to
Romantic Poetry,” The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century
Literature, eds. Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggraf Turley (Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press, 2006), 143.
77 O’Neill, 143.
78 Bloom defines this succinctly as “completion and antithesis.”
79 Bloom, “Tessera or Completion and Antithesis,” 64-5.
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Kaleidoscope 3(1) – 2009
and the “she” figure of love, Crane begins to revive “What I hold healed, original now, and
pure” and “builds, within, a tower that is not stone” but pebbles (BT 32-3). Through “fragmentation” Crane rebuilds his understanding of the significance of life and being human.
80
He rediscovers the elevating and transcendental powers of love, the “matrix of the heart”
which is central to being, and the power of his poetry “Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its
shower” (BT 37, 40). This fragmentation and destructive-creative process is seen in Byron’s
image of the broken mirror in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Out of destruction and the sorrows
of his broken heart is born greater meaning in the human heart:
Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the more it breaks (CHP III. 33. 289-92).
Human experiences, even ones of broken love, multiply the meaning and significance of
being. O’Neill explains this Romantic trope:
At their most imaginatively daring and heterodox, the Romantics glimpse
epiphany and loss in the same moment of vision […] The shared experience
of a dispossession that empowers a sense of possible sublimity links Romantic
poems with many poems of a later climate.81
Crane glimpses possible sublimity out of destruction and despair, like Demogorgon’s encomium at the end of Prometheus Unbound: “To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates /
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (PU 4.573-4). From his wrecked vision of an
original voice and his failure to reach ideals of love, beauty, and a paradisal future through
his poetry, Crane finds hope in human love to rebuild and re-vision life and being. As Lewis
states: “[the poem] moves through pain and doubt to a peacefully confident sense of renewed
life and love and poetic power.”82
Crane’s final vision does not seem as assured as his affirmation of the poetic word and human imagination at the end of Voyages. It ends not so much in triumph, but in quiet hope for
the “human mind’s imaginings” providing his poetry with a place in his “visionary company”
of predecessors. 83 He becomes “revived and sure” (BT 30), coming to a renewed acceptance of his place amid his literary past in a vision of “epiphany and loss,”84 understanding
that literary influence is a re-making of vision, voice and self, a process of gaining and giving,
destruction and re-creation, to arrive at something new; an enriched and understood sense
of being.85 As Goethe avows, “Only by making the riches of the others our own do we bring
anything great into being.”86
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80 See O’Neill quotation above.
81 O’Neill, 147.
82 Lewis, “Thresholds Old and New,” 394-5.
83 See footnote 51.
84 See O’Neill quotation above.
85 Oscar Wilde remarks in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. that: “Influence is simply a transference
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86 Bloom, “Tessera or Completion and Antithesis,” 52.
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Abbreviations
A – Alastor [Shelley]
At – Atlantis [Crane]
AM – Ave Maria [Crane]
B – The Bridge [Crane]
BT – The Broken Tower [Crane]
CH – Cape Hatteras [Crane]
CHP – Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [Byron]
D – The Dance [Crane]
DP – A Defence of Poetry [Shelley]
En – Endymion [Keats]
ESA – The Eve of St. Agnes [Keats]
FH – For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen [Crane]
GU – Ode on a Grecian Urn [Keats]
H – Hyperion. A Fragment [Keats]
I –Indiana [Crane]
KK – Kubla Khan [Coleridge]
ON – Ode to a Nightingale [Keats]
OP – Ode to Psyche [Keats]
PU – Prometheus Unbound [Shelley]
SM – Song of Myself [Whitman]
TBB – To Brooklyn Bridge [Crane]
TR – The River [Crane]
TS – To a Skylark [Shelley]
V- Voyages [Crane]
VW – Van Winkle
WL – The Wasteland [Eliot]
Rachel Hoyes
[email protected]
Rachel Hoyes completed her MA dissertation at Durham University, where she
specialised in Romantic literature and the legacy of Romanticism in Modern
poetry. She is currently working as a journalist in London while continuing
research on the literary heritage of Romanticism.
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